Anatomy of Restlessness.

I am finishing up Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness. Being jobless and stuck in my apartment most days while Mrs. P is at work, I found this book both thrilling and depressing. I am a big Chatwin fan, but I especially enjoyed this posthumous publication because of the honesty of a few of the pieces, such as “I Always Wanted To Go To Patagonia” and a letter wherein he spells out the plan for his great book on nomadism/restlessness that never got written. I mean, Chatwin was a little…pretentious at times, such as when, in The Songlines, he spelled out how awesome his black notebooks were in such detail that an Italian company was able to reproduce them ten years later. I mean, I confess an addiction of sorts to those little treasures, so I think this is a good thing. But in an interview, maybe. In the main text? Pretentious? Or maybe brave? A little soul-baring? Chatwin says that the man he was talking to looked at him, when Chatwin told him about his precious notebooks, as if he had never heard anything more pretentious. Did that happen, or did old Bruce imagine that in some kind of self-consciousness?